The proposed research will investigate the comprehension--by children between the ages of 2 and 5--of wh-questions, that is, questions beginning with 'what,' 'where,' 'who,' 'how,' 'why,' and 'when'. Previous research has demonstrated that children develop the ability to understand such constructions in roughly the order given above, with a few interesting exceptions. The study will address the total communicative competence of the child, with particular attention given to the stages involved in the development of this comprehension. The following specific questions should be answered by the proposed investigation: (a) To what extent does the nonlinguistic context in which a question is used affect the child's ability to answer the question? (b) What comprehension strategies does the child employ prior to the development of native command of the syntactic principles underlying the structure of wh-questions? (c) To what extent can the development of the ablity to answer wh-questions be seen to parallel conceptual development during this period? The investigation will be conducted in a format of storytelling accompanied by felt-board illustrations. The data will be analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively.